Here, Not There

There is nothing quite so tumultuous as existing between worlds.  It's true: Negative Capability is essential in life if we are to meet the times when we are neither here nor there.  But what is such capability?

The term comes from a letter the poet Keats wrote to his brother on 21 December 1817:

... at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Negative Capability is seen in a person who can rest easy within unresolved situations, who doesn't grasp after certainties, who is "content with half-knowledge."  This is not the person T. S. Eliot described (and did not praise) as being "assured of certain certainties."  One thing in life is certain: uncertainties exist if not prevail.

I'm Fairly Certain This Is Keats

The ability to breathe an aesthetic element within the uncertain moment is the very same thing, I think, that allows us to listen to dissonant music and still enjoy it.

--A musical joke about Negative Capability: How did Bach's children get their father up in the morning?  They would go to the harpsichord, play each note up through an octave except for the last note.  Bach would have to get out of bed and hit the final note to create the resolution.  But he was out of bed.

To Be Certain, Remember to Bach up Your Files --
and Your Words.  B sharp and make a Note of It.

No Negative Capability there.  He could not be content with the beauty of the other notes in themselves -- could not, that is, fall off to sleep once more without adding the missing note.

Keats' nod to beauty is more vehement than it sounds (he was a Romantic, and beauty isn't just a <yawn> incidental felicity to him).  It "overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all...."

Yeah.  But there comes a time when one can exist no longer in uncertainties.  That point differs between people.  Yet even if beauty is present in the midst of uncertainties, there is a point when some (perhaps you may say it's only so of weaker persons, not the "Man of Achievement" Keats speaks of) may no longer exist with uncertainties, even with the "panacea" of beauty. We must find a resolution.

Is beauty merely a Panacea?  The opiate of those uncertain?  Perhaps so.  When the practicalities of life hit, when uncertainties of a lost job, of an Offer without a contract that goes on perpetually, shifting with words, words, led out to obscure and equivocate against other words....  It may be in such a case that one discovers that the few lesser uncertainties in the hand are worth any dozens of prospective certainties in the bush.

Beauty does little to change the practicalities of life's situations at that point.  Sometimes life is un-beautiful in being merely practical.  That, to an artist, is its worst vestige.  That beauty is not usually practical is perhaps in the very nature of -- the value -- of it.  The art we seem least intrigued by is the purely commercial and practical (well...except for the postmodernist, who thinks the smiley face is "Art" equal to the Mona Lisa, but then...that might be either the postmodernist's Negative Capability or lack of it).  The beauty we love is more often found in a museum or outdoors, making us travel to behold it -- it's not so practical as to be unremarkable.

Let's see.  Where did I get to?

After much turmoil at delays and a basket of prospective entails getting heavier at each discussion, yet with nothing certified in writing, including having no contract after a month post-offer -- an initial offer which itself was lessened due to a "miscommunication" on salary...to their benefit (read "bait-and-switch"), I kept my position at my university instead of leaving for the uncertain offer.  Call it a lack of Negative Capability, or call it a lack of beauty allowing one to exist with perpetual uncertainties, but the end is the same.  And I embrace the resolution here.